Stacey Levine - Dra-

“Here, Miss,” he said, bending toward her hesitantly. “I see your lips are dry. Could I share some of this oil with you?” He offered a small container, leaning forward, eyes moving closely down the length of her body, then he slipped the container back in his pocket as if he had forgotten why he was holding it. She looked back at him, repelled by the closeness of his face, watching the sweat gather along his neck. Tears welled in his eyes, and as he spoke, he stepped even closer, pushing his face next to hers.

“To get something from another person, you’ve got to lose something, maybe everything,” he whispered. “Isn’t that what they say?”

“Is it?” she whispered back stiffly.

The man did not answer. Edgily, he tugged at the hair on his forearms. “Usually I don’t think I’m mad, but if I feel I’m going toward an edge, an edge where you fall off and go mad, why, I take a pill, and the pill stops it from happening. Well, maybe a pill can also stop you from losing yourself to someone else. What do you say?”

“Well, yes … maybe.”

“I used to wonder, Can the wind be stopped? No, I said, it can’t, the wind comes from nature. But now I see I was wrong — nature can be stopped all over the place.”

Drawing a breath, she waited, then said uneasily, “Nature doesn’t care about us, does she?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, she doesn’t,” the man answered, smiling, leaning back with some relief. “No, nature doesn’t care. She’s a bad mother, and she only wants one thing from us.”

“What is that?”

He gave forth a sniffing, suppressed laugh. “What in shit’s name do you think?” He waited, then hesitantly reached forward, saying, “Can I just see inside your mouth for a moment, Miss?” and she complied, immediately tipping her jaw upward and opening it as the man said softly, “I want to see, that’s all, just for a minute — I want to see if I was right about something,” as he grasped the back of her head and shoulders.

Slowly he lowered her body to the floor, kneeling and peering into the mouth for some time. Then the man turned away, shaking his head violently and gripping his hands together for some moments, as if struggling with something he loathed.

The man stood, pacing around the room, wiping his brow. “It’s strange getting to know someone, isn’t it? Learning all the bad-smelling things about them — I don’t care for it. I don’t like new friends. I’m not partial to compliments, either, they don’t agree with me; even when I hear the phrase ‘you’re pretty nice!’ I’m at the edge of not wanting to live anymore. I’d wager you’re the same.”

Lying there stiffly, looking at him from the floor, Dra— lifted her head slightly and said only that she meant no offense, but she must leave immediately to go find her new Administrator, since the woman might be searching for her at this very moment, unable to find her because she, Dra—, was lying here on the floor of a half-deserted worksite, and that thought was too difficult to bear.

The man responded coolly, “Oh, you don’t surprise me at all. I wasn’t going to let you stay, anyway! I can see who you are, pretty much, and it reasons that lots of things about you are going to disagree with me in an awful bad way … in other words, there are lines I won’t cross, Miss — and you seem to conjure up most of them.” He looked to the floor. “Maybe most people do.”

He moved to the doorway, blocking it for a moment with his girth. “Everything is wrong with everybody,” he said to himself, going into a dark mail room nearby. From there he disappeared into a warren of smaller offices beyond, and, waiting there on the floor, worried about the Administrator and other things besides, Dra— looked down the length of her body and noticed a raw, sore bump shaped like a nipple on her upper arm, which began to throb painfully as soon as she perceived it. Then her entire arm and torso felt sore, and unable to think about this or anything else, she turned over and slept.

When she woke, the room was pitch-black, and immediately she called out for the man, who did not answer. Aching, she sat up, feeling a waxy piece of paper stapled to her skirt. Wending through the mail room and into the lighted hallway, she saw it was a note, and tore it from her. It was written by the man, and said she must stay and complete a task in this department in order to pay him for the frustration she had caused him, and also to test her skills, just in case one day he might be able to tolerate more in life, and so could call upon her to work with him. The task would not be too arduous, the note read, and after she had completed it, she was to go on her way. She was to work alone, it said, because the man could not bear to be in the vicinity during any part of this.

The note then listed directions for the job, which consisted of sending some old metal film canisters through a pneumatic tube system that was large as a city and also very old; the note added that Dra— must finish the work by evening’s end. Glancing down, she found a second note stapled to her skirt, in which the man explained that he was worried about his son, who was growing rapidly day by day. This disturbed the man; he did not want his son to exist anymore, the note said, because the child was getting too old and complex, and too full of opinions. But the son would probably live, the man conceded; still, for his own comfort, the man would try to flatten the boy’s personal dimensions, and for the time being, the man had gone away to find water.

Pondering the curious messages, she wandered into the empty workrooms, pleased at least that there was work for her to do; and it seemed peculiar that the task had come to her so easily, without her even asking for it, whereas in the Employment Office, the very center for job-hiring, it had taken considerably longer to procure work.

On a table before her, she found the canisters. Gathering them in her arms, she carried them to the tube, ready to push them one at a time into the slot. But the slot was locked, somehow; and when she found a key on the wall to unlock it, the key only opened the door an inch or so. It seemed that another key was needed at this point, or that the slot was jammed; but she reasoned she might simply remove the film from each canister and slip them alone into the opening, without the canisters. She would not worry about ruining the old film, she told herself, prying open the first canister with her nails, because the workroom was rather dark, and besides, the film itself was covered by a plastic wrap that was dark — certainly dark enough to obscure most light, though not all degrees of light.

So she worked in this way, removing the film from all canisters. The job went smoothly, and she hummed, but after some time she scowled in displeasure that turned to rage, for a few feet behind her she glimpsed a supply counter where a bearded man sat, watching her and smiling with great mirth.

After she noticed him watching her, she set to work at a furious pace, tearing the moldy film packets from the canisters and shoving them into the tube. Some of the packets were too large to fit into the slot, however, so in frustration she slammed her palm upon the slot then ripped off the dark plastic that covered the film, which actually proved to be not film at all, she saw, but small wooden blocks with crude impressions of life gouged into their sides. These she tried to jam into the slot, but could not.

Turning again to glare at the clerk, who grinned further and nodded his head, she began to shove all sorts of broken glass, debris, and dust from the floor into the slot, grabbing anything that came to hand, and then she took the empty canisters, tearing their lids off, and crushed them with her hard shoes, submitting the flattened pieces into the slot, spitting as she heaved an exhausted breath and slid to the floor where the man could not see. Panting, she saw lying on the floor a torn circular that had been enclosed with the film, warning of dire contaminants in the film.